hunter before the Lord." The Bible refers to Ethiopia as being far distant
from Palestine. In the book of Isaiah we read "the land of the rustling of
wings which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia that sendeth ambassadors by
the sea." The rivers of Ethiopia mentioned in Isaiah are the upper
tributaries of the Nile, the Atbara, the Blue Nile and the Sobat.

The later capital of Ethiopia was Meroe. Recent excavations have shown
Meroe to have been a city larger than Memphis. The Temple of Ammon, where
kings were crowned, was one of the largest in the valley of the Nile. The
great walls of cut stones were 15 feet thick and 30 feet high. Heaps of
iron-slag and furnaces for smelting iron were discovered, and there were
magnificent quays and landing places on the river side, for the export of
iron. Excavations have also shown that for 150 years Egypt was a dependency
of Ethiopia. The kings of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth Egyptian
dynasties were really governors appointed by Ethiopian overlords, while the
twenty-fifth dynasty was founded by the Ethiopian king, Sabako, in order to
check Assyrian aggression. Palestine was enabled to hold out against
Assyria by Ethiopian help. Sennacherib's attempt to capture Jerusalem and
carry the Jews into captivity, was frustrated by the army of the Ethiopian
king, Taharka. The nation and religion of Judah were thus preserved from
being absorbed in heathen lands like the lost Ten Tribes. The Negro
soldiers of the Sudan saved the Jewish religion.

The old Greek writers were well acquainted with Ethiopia. According to them
in the most ancient times there existed to the South of Egypt a nation and
a land designated as Ethiopia. This was the land where the people with the
sunburnt faces dwelt. The Greek poet, Homer, mentions the Ethiopians as
dwelling at the uttermost limits of the earth, where they enjoyed personal
intercourse with the gods. In one place Homer said that Neptune, the god of
the sea, "had gone to feast with the Ethiopians who dwell afar off, the
Ethiopians who are divided into two parts, the most distant of men, some
at the setting of the sun, others at the rising." Herodotus, the Greek
historian, described the Ethiopians as long lived and their country as
extending to the Southern Sea.

The great fame of the Ethiopians is thus sketched by the eminent historian,
Heeren, who in his historical researches says: "In the earliest traditions
of nearly all the more civilized nations o